CDN's: "What's Next" + P2P at HostingCon
Yesterday at HostingCon in Chicago I shared the morning keynote podium with Jinesh Varia, Evangelist for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Chris Gladwin, Chairman and CTO of CleverSafe. A few comments below, and you can view my presentation on "CDN's: What's Next" on SlideShare.
Jinesh started the session by highlighting some of the great work Amazon is doing in the hosted services space with AWS. Perhaps most impressive, he mentioned that Amazon now had more than 265,000 developers signed up to work on the AWS platform, including entire companies that are being built to serve other companies who are using the platform - one example Jinesh gave was Rightscale, whose homepage image appears below. Pretty cool.
Chris spoke next and highlighted some of the amazing things Cleversafe is doing with dispersed storage. Cleversafe's technology is pretty impressive, and perhaps even more interesting is the approach Chris and Co. are taking by opensourcing the platform at Cleversafe.org. I was impressed enough to make an intro for Chris to the VeriSign technology team.
I spoke last, and highlighted three major trends we're seeing in the CDN space (again, see ppt on Slideshare):
1) The Rush to Quality. The rapidly rising consumer demand for high quality video on the Net (vs. the typical lower quality streaming video we see on most UGC sites). Distributors and content owners are meeting this demand through lower costs of distribution via technologies like P2P.
2) Any Time, Any Where. Consumers are increasingly demanding their content be flexible and reachable Any Time, Any Where. This includes in the home, on the pc and mobile phone.
3) Restoring the Value of the Digital Asset. Content owners and distributors are increasingly becoming aware that 10's of millions of pirated videos are being downloaded on filehsharing networks every day. Some estimates put the value of illegal video at more than $5B annually in the US alone (see stats on my ppt). The bulk of consumers who download a video illegally don't go into a store and buy it, or rent it from Netflix. Hopefully this realization spurs additional movement towards more liberal rights agreements and consumer control over their media.
